US Politics

The Republican extremist Marjorie Taylor Greene attracted widespread condemnation – from transgender groups, Democrats and her own party – after she hung a transphobic sign outside her office in response to fellow congresswoman Marie Newman raising a transgender pride flag.The Georgia congresswoman put up the poster – which read “There are TWO genders: Male & Female. Trust The Science!” – after Newman, whose daughter is transgender and whose office is opposite Greene’s, hung the flag on Wednesday following an impassioned debate on the Equality Act, which Greene tried to block.She has also called the bill “an attack on God’s creation” and refused to refer to Newman’s daughter as female.Despite Greene’s attempts to delay a vote on the legislation, which would extend civil rights protections to LGBTQ people, it is expected to pass in the House, after which it will move on to the Senate, where it could face a filibuster. Joe Biden has said if it passes he will sign it into law.Speaking on the House floor this week, Newman, who represents Illinois, said: “The best time to pass this act was decades ago. The second best time is right now. I’m voting yes on the Equality Act for Evie Newman, my daughter and the strongest, bravest person I know.”After the debate, Newman tweeted a video of herself putting out the flag. She wrote: “Our neighbour, @RepMTG, tried to block the Equality Act because she believes prohibiting discrimination against trans Americans is ‘disgusting, immoral, and evil.’ Thought we’d put up our Transgender flag so she can look at it every time she opens her door.”Greene, who has a history of supporting dangerous conspiracy theories, including QAnon, wrote in response: “Our neighbour, @RepMarieNewman, wants to pass the so-called ‘Equality’ Act to destroy women’s rights and religious freedoms. Thought we’d put up ours so she can look at it every time she opens her door.”The incident was widely condemned, with the Illinois Democrat Sean Casten branding the poster “sickening, pathetic, unimaginably cruel”. He added: “This hate is exactly why the #EqualityAct is necessary”.The Human Rights Campaign, the LGBTQ civil rights organization, said: “Trans kids have a higher risk of attempting suicide because they so often encounter people who deny their humanity. We are sending our love to @RepMarieNewman and her daughter.”Republicans also spoke out against Greene. “This is sad and I’m sorry this happened,” said the Illinois Republican Adam Kinzinger. “Rep Newman’s daughter is transgender, and this video and tweet represents the hate and fame driven politics of self-promotion at all evil costs. This garbage must end.”The conservative CNN commentator SE Cupp said: “Rep. Newman’s daughter is transgender. Public servants of good faith argue policy. Ghouls who believe they’re only representing themselves, not actual people, get personal and nasty.”Speaking today, Newman told CNN: “On this issue yesterday she tried to block the Equality Act and I felt as though she needed to hear from us … I just wanted to make a statement so that she sees LGBTQ+ people.”She added: “She’s welcome to her sign, no one’s buying it and that is not science.” More

Dr Rachel Levine, a pediatrician and health official from Pennsylvania, faced a Senate confirmation hearing on Thursday as Joe Biden’s nominee for assistant health secretary. The process could see her become the first openly transgender federal official to be confirmed by the US Senate.If confirmed, Levine, 63, would make history and break several glass ceilings. In a country which still only has a handful of openly trans public officials, she would be the most high-profile, occupying a senior position in the Biden administration with major responsibilities in the pandemic response.Announcing her nomination last month, Biden said Levine would bring “steady leadership and essential expertise we need to get through this pandemic … She is a historic and deeply qualified choice to help lead our administration’s health efforts.”As the confirmation hearing got under way on Thursday Levine faced hostile questioning from some of the Republican members of the Senate. Rand Paul, senator from Kentucky, compared transgender surgery misleadingly to genital mutilation and accused Levine of supporting “surgical destruction of a minor’s genitalia”.Levine replied by saying that transgender medicine was very complex. “If I am fortunate enough to be confirmed, I will look forward to working with you and your office on the standards of care” in this field, she said.Paul was rebuked by the chair of the committee, Patty Murray, for his “harmful misrepresentations”.Levine is practiced in the art of negotiating confirmation hearings. She had to be confirmed by the Pennsylvania senate in 2015 for her first public role as physician general of the state.The following year she told the Washington Post that she succeeded in securing a unanimous confirmation vote after she sat down one-on-one with the state senators. “With very few exceptions my being transgender is not an issue,” she told the newspaper.Since the start of the pandemic she has led Pennsylvania’s effort to combat the health crisis as the state’s health secretary. In such a highly visible role she has been confronted by a rash of hostile and anti-trans mockery and abuse on social media and even at a public fair.Last July the governor of Pennsylvania, Tom Wolf, who brought Levine into public office, felt it necessary to put out a statement defending her against what he called “vile acts” and “relentless comments and slurs”. He said she was a “highly skilled, valued and capable member of my administration and transgender”.Biden’s nomination of Levine is one of several moves taken by the new administration to promote LGBTQ+ rights. Last month the president lifted Donald Trump’s ban on transgender people serving in the US military.Earlier this month Pete Buttigieg became the first openly gay person to be confirmed to a cabinet post as transportation secretary. More

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Happy Thursday,
During the final week of Black History Month, I wanted to continue to look at the people who helped shape the Voting Rights Act, the powerful 1965 law that offered unprecedented protection for voting rights in America. As the country faces another surge of efforts to make it harder to vote, it’s a reminder of how hard Black Americans had to fight to gain and protect the rights to vote that are in place now.
Last week, I wrote about Bloody Sunday, the March 1965 protest that led directly to the Voting Rights Act. The heroes of that march – people like John Lewis, Hosea Williams and Martin Luther King Jr – have become lions of American history. But until recently, one of the most overlooked people in the march was Amelia Boynton (later Amelia Boynton Robinson), who had been organizing in Selma for years before Bloody Sunday and was the one who called in King to bring national attention to the voter suppression in the now historic city.
“She got us the Voting Rights Act,” said Carol Anderson, a historian at Emory University.
“It’s one of the ‘failings’, and I’ll put that in quotes, of the writings of the civil rights movement, is that women who are key in organizing are written out,” she added. “The grassroots work of Mrs Boynton just didn’t get the kind of respect and honor that it deserved.”
By the time Lewis, King and others arrived in Selma, Boynton was already one of the most well-known and respected people in its Black community. She came to the city in 1929 when she got a job with the US Department of Agriculture, traveling around the state to show African Americans how to improve their farming, but also talking to them about voting. She and her then husband, Samuel Boynton, held meetings in homes and churches, showing people how to register to vote as they faced literacy tests and poll taxes, Jim Crow era obstacles that prevented Black people from registering to vote. More

At his recent town hall, Joe Biden made a series of convoluted and condescending comments about American student debt. His remarks cast doubt on his ability, or willingness, to confront this country’s ballooning student loan crisis. Within hours, #cancelstudentdebt was trending on Twitter.Biden’s rambling justification of the status quo was peppered with straw men, invocations of false scarcity and non-solutions. He pitted working-class Americans against each other, implying that people who attend private schools aren’t worthy of relief, as though poor students don’t also attend such schools. He said that money would be better spent on early childhood education instead of debt cancellation, as if educators aren’t themselves drowning in student debt, and as if we can’t address both concerns at once. He suggested relying on parents or selling a home at a profit to settle your debt, a luxury those without intergenerational wealth or property cannot afford. And he touted various programs, including Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF), that have totally failed borrowers: over 95% of PSLF applicants have been denied.In contrast to Biden’s smug comments, Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley recently revealed that she defaulted on her student loans. Similarly, at a recent Debt Collective event, congressional hopeful Nina Turner said that she and her son owe a combined $100,000. Former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams has, of course, proudly confessed to being in debt, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has said that becoming a congressperson was easier than paying off her debt. Philadelphia councilmember Kendra Brooks (who is planning to introduce a city resolution calling on the Biden administration to cancel all student debt) has also spoken out about her own struggles as a borrower. Their experience and candor – and commitment to real solutions including cancellation – demonstrate why we need debtors, not millionaires, in our public offices.Let’s be clear about another thing. Biden absolutely has the legal authority to use executive power to cancel all federal student debt. Congress granted this authority decades ago as part of the Higher Education Act. It’s even been put to the test: in response to the Covid pandemic, Donald Trump and his former education secretary, Betsy DeVos, used that authority three times to suspend payments and student loan interest.As he rambled on, Biden gave the distinct impression that he preferred not to have the power to do so. That way he could blame Congress should his campaign promises go unkept. (The day after the town hall, Biden’s press secretary, Jen Psaki, attempted to clarify her boss’s remarks about whether he will use executive authority to cancel student debt. She stated that the administration was still considering the possibility.)Adding to the confusion, Biden seemed unable to keep his own campaign pledges straight, muddling his student debt cancellation proposals. For the record, he campaigned on two distinct planks. One: “immediate” cancellation of $10,000 for every borrower as a form of Covid relief. Two: the cancellation of all undergraduate student loans for debt-holders who attended public universities and HBCUs and who earn up to $125,000 a year. Keeping these two promises is the absolute minimum the Biden administration needs to do to keep the public’s trust.But the Biden administration should, and can, do much more. Biden should cancel all student debt using executive authority. It is the simplest way the new administration can help tens of millions of people who are being crushed by the double whammy of unpayable loans and an economy-destroying pandemic.Yet, to date, all the Biden administration has done for this country’s 45 million student debtors is extend Trump and DeVos’s federal student loan payment suspension. Continuing a flawed Republican policy is hardly a progressive victory – especially not for the 8 million FFEL borrowers who are unconscionably left out of the moratorium.Biden owes this country debt relief not only because he campaigned on it, but because he helped cause the problem. A former senator from Delaware, the credit card capital of the world, he spent decades carrying water for financial interests and expanding access to student loans while limiting borrower protections.Biden’s brand is empath-in-chief, but on student debt he is alarmingly out of touchBiden’s record shows that he won’t address the problem without being pushed. Indeed, the fact that the president has embraced debt cancellation at all (however inadequate his proposals) is testament to ongoing grassroots efforts. The Debt Collective, a group I organize with, has been pushing for student debt abolition and free public college for nearly a decade. On 21 January, we launched the Biden Jubilee 100 – 100 borrowers on debt strike demanding full cancellation within the administration’s first hundred days. A growing list of senators and congresspeople have signed on to resolutions calling on Biden to cancel $50,000 a borrower using executive authority. (It’s worth noting that the $50,000 figure is based on outdated research. After three years of rapidly rising debt loads, the scholars behind it now recommend $75,000 of cancellation.) A growing chorus of voices from across the country and a range of backgrounds are shouting in unison: cancel student debt.Biden’s brand is empath-in-chief, but on student debt he is alarmingly out of touch. The president has shared that his own children borrowed for college and noted that he was the “poorest man in Congress” – meaning the poorest man in a body of millionaires. He didn’t question the ease with which his well-connected kids got well-compensated jobs enabling them to repay their loans, nor mention that people his age were able to go to college without being burdened by a mountain of debt. All people want today is the same opportunity that Biden and his peers had.Instead of acknowledging this generational disparity, Biden reiterated a common criticism of more generous forms of student debt cancellation – that it would help the privileged, specifically the minuscule subset of debt-holders who attended the Ivy League. But as Ocasio-Cortez tweeted in response: “Very wealthy people already have a student loan forgiveness program. It’s called their parents.” As things stand, poor and working people typically pay more for the same degrees than their affluent counterparts due to years or decades of monthly payments and accumulating interest. Our debt-financed higher education system is a tax on poor people who dare pursue a better life.Imagine if, instead of defending the status quo, Biden used his platform to articulate the social benefits of cancelling student debt. He could have said that cancelling student debt will support 45 million Americans and provide an estimated trillion-dollar economic boost over the next decade and create millions of desperately needed jobs. He could have spoken about canceling student debt as a way to help close the racial wealth gap, acknowledging that Black borrowers are the most burdened, or talked about how education should be free and accessible to all if we want to expand opportunity and deepen democracy. He could have acknowledged that cancellation will help struggling seniors, especially those having their social security checks garnished because of student loan defaults. He could have mentioned that debt cancellation is popular, even among many Republicans, and that eliminating it will help his party stay in power.He didn’t say any of that, and so we have to say it. Debtors have to get organized, connecting online and protesting in the streets. We live in a period of intersecting crises. Some of them are very difficult to solve. But cancelling student debt is easy. By refusing to act, the president and his administration are choosing to perpetuate a system that causes profound, pointless, and preventable harm.Astra Taylor is the author of Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone, and an organizer with the Debt Collective More

Sign up for the Guardian Today US newsletterBeverly Hills has seen more residents arrested for participating in the US Capitol insurrection than any other city in California.Three of the 14 California residents charged in connection with the pro-Trump riot in Washington on 6 January so far are from the wealthy Los Angeles county enclave: Gina Bisignano, a salon owner, and Simone Gold and John Strand, two rightwing activists who have spread coronavirus misinformation through their roles in America’s Frontline Doctors, an organization that Gold, an emergency room physician, founded.The 11 other Californians who have been charged in the riot are scattered across the state, from San Diego to San Francisco, with three clustered in towns around Sacramento, the state capital, and two from towns in the notoriously conservative Orange county, south of Los Angeles.The prominence of Beverly Hills and the profile of the three residents who have been charged reflects what experts say are broader trends in the backgrounds of the more than 250 people charged so far in connection with the Capitol riot.More than 90% of the people charged in the riots so far are white, researchers at the Chicago Project on Security and Threats found. About 40% are business owners or have white-collar jobs, the researchers found, and compared with previous rightwing extremists, relatively few of them were unemployed.“There’s been this assumption that the most reactionary folks on the frontlines would be what’s often referred to as white working-class, but that’s of course not what we saw,” said Vanessa Wills, a political philosopher who studies the intersections of race and class. “The people who showed up are disproportionately small business owners.”The people charged in the attack so far also did not come exclusively from Republican states or conservative enclaves. In fact, a majority lived in counties that Biden won, like Beverly Hills, nestled next to Hollywood in liberal Los Angeles county.Only 10% of the people charged so far had identifiable ties to rightwing militias or other organized violent groups, the Chicago researchers found. Many more were people who had identified as mainstream Trump supporters.From lockdown protests to the US CapitolSalon owner Bisignano was indicted on seven counts, including destruction of government property and civil disorder.Gold and Strand, the rightwing activists, were indicted on five counts, including disorderly conduct in a capitol building. Gold’s lawyer declined to comment on the charges against her, and Strand and Bisignano’s lawyers did not respond to requests for comment.All three Beverly Hills defendants were already prominent rightwing protest figures before the events at the Capitol.Bisignano had gone viral in December for shouting homophobic slurs at an anti-lockdown protest outside the home of Los Angeles’ public health director, according to TMZ, which called her “coronavirus lockdown Karen”.“You’re a new world order satanist,” Bisignano told a person filming her at the protest, according to the TMZ video. “You’re a Nazi and you’re brainwashed.”“Is there something wrong with not wanting a lockdown?” she asked. “Is there something wrong with wanting freedom?”Gold, who has been labeled a “toxic purveyor of misinformation” for her public stances questioning the safety of the coronavirus vaccine and touting hydroxychloroquine as a cure for the virus, was part of an anti-lockdown demonstration with other doctors on the steps of the supreme court in July. Video of the doctors spreading misinformation about Covid-19 was repeatedly shared by Trump and by Donald Trump Jr, and ultimately viewed more than 14m times, despite takedowns by multiple social media platforms, the Washington Post reported.Strand, the communications director for America’s Frontline doctors, was also one of the main organizers of the frequent pro-Trump rallies in Beverly Hills before and after the election, the Los Angeles Times reported.“The election is not over,” Strand said at a protest in mid-November after Trump had lost the election, according to footage posted on YouTube. “Yes, we have a chance to win the election.”All three Beverly Hills defendants had spoken out publicly about their participation in the Capitol riot before they were arrested, including in newspapers interviews and on social media.“I’m like, I didn’t know we were storming the Capitol. I should have dressed different,” Bisignano told the Beverly Hills Courier before her arrest, noting that she had worn Chanel boots as well as a Louis Vuitton sweater to the riot.•••It is not clear how wealthy or financially stable Bisignano or the other Beverly Hills defendants are. While many of the Americans charged in the Capitol riots were educated, employed and financially stable enough to afford a trip across the country to attend a pro-Trump protest, a Washington Post analysis also found that many people charged in the attack had some history of financial troubles, and that, as a group, they were twice as likely as Americans overall to have a history of bankruptcy.Understanding the background and social status of alleged domestic terrorists is important to understanding what can be done to counter this kind of radicalization and prevent future attacks. The profiles of the Capitol rioters already present a challenge for these kinds of efforts, researchers say.“What we are dealing with here is not merely a mix of rightwing organizations, but a broader mass movement with violence at its core,” the Chicago Project on Security and Threats researchers wrote in a public presentation on their initial findings. Normal strategies for countering violent extremism, like social programs for the poor, or arrests targeting organized extremists groups, would not work, the researchers concluded: what was needed was “de-escalation approaches for anger among large swaths of mainstream society”.Many Americans had reason to be angry at the failures of politicians and the federal government during the pandemic, which has led to widespread unemployment, disproportionate burdens on people of color, and half a million people dead, but the Capitol attackers were not broadly representative of the US population.Experts have emphasized the importance of recognizing the coded attacks on the legitimacy of Black voters’ ballots within Trump’s rhetoric about “election fraud”, and the value of understanding the Capitol insurrection as an act of racial violence motivated by white supremacist ideas.But the economic and class backgrounds of the alleged Capitol rioters may also be revealing, particularly as many Americans struggle to understand why so many of their fellow citizens were vulnerable to Trump’s lies about election fraud and lurid conspiracy theories like QAnon.The white Americans who showed up at the Capitol did not appear to represent big business or the country’s financial elite, Wills, the political philosopher, said. Instead, they appeared to largely represent people who felt squeezed by bigger companies, resentful towards the government, which had provided a small business pandemic relief program that failed to help many small businesses, and also resentful towards “working-class demands that they see as hostile to their interests as small business owners”.It was no accident that chaotic anti-lockdown protests at state capitols during the early months of the pandemic were a precursor to the attack on the Capitol in Washington, Wills argued: the public health lockdown measures were specifically threatening to small businesses, and their ability to ensure that their employees would return to work.While susceptibility to conspiracy theories involves many factors, she argued, people would likely be more open to embrace wild theories if the theories justified them acting on what was already in their economic interest.“Most people would find it hard to think well of themselves if they confronted the fact that they woke up that morning and decided they are going to frustrate society’s attempts to contain a pandemic for their own private financial benefit,” Wills said. More

Amid warnings that domestic abuse has spiked alarmingly during the pandemic, an account published on Tuesday of a year-long relationship between a women’s right’s activist and successful producer Tanya Selvaratnam and the former New York state attorney general Eric Schneiderman, could hardly be more timely.Selvaratnam went public with accusations of intimate violence against her former boyfriend in the New Yorker in May 2018. Three other women who had been involved with Schneiderman also came forward with disturbing accounts of subjugation.The attorney general, who had established a political platform as a civil rights advocate, including suing the convicted rapist Harvey Weinstein, stepped down.The New York governor, Andrew Cuomo, called for a special prosecutor to look into the allegations against Schneiderman, but after a six-month criminal investigation prosecutors concluded that while the accusations of abuse were credible, there were legal hurdles to bringing charges. Schneiderman has denied the allegations.In Assume Nothing: A Story of Intimate Violence, Selvaratnam describes “a fairytale that became a nightmare” and recounts the relationship in the context of Schneiderman’s “entrapment, isolation, control, demeaning, and abuse”. The account makes for disturbing reading in which alleged physical abuse was but one instrument of subjugation.Selvaratnam alleges that Schneiderman would “slap me until I agreed to call him ‘Master’ or ‘Daddy’”. He recounted his fantasies of finding me somewhere far away to be his slave, his “brown girl”.The abuse, she said, increased to the point that Schneiderman spat on her and choked her. “I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was dealing with the kind of abuse that can go on between people in committed relationships: intimate violence.“But I had convinced myself that he would be my partner, maybe for life. If I wanted to keep him, I felt I had to let him dominate me.” Scared to come forward with her story, Selvaratnam writes that Schneiderman threatened to kill her if they broke up.In an interview with the Guardian on Tuesday, Selvaratnam, who is also the author of The Big Lie, an examination of the work-family conflict many women face, said she “wrote her way out of the darkness” of that relationship.She described intimate partner violence (IPV) in committed relationships as the next wave of the #MeToo movement. In recent weeks, Evan Rachel Wood and FKA twigs have come forward with their own accounts of abuse within past relationships, while Justin Timberlake issued an apology to Britney Spears for “missteps” that he said contributed to “a system that condones misogyny and racism”.In coming forward, Selvaratnam hopes to “shift the perception of what a victim looks like”.“Even fierce women – strong and independent – get abused. And there are so many people who can’t get out of abusive relationships because they don’t have the support and resources to do so. The pandemic has heightened the urgency of a domestic violence crisis because victims have been in lockdown with their abusers.”On average, one in four women and one in nine men experience intimate partner violence. A recent New England Journal of Medicine paper, A Pandemic within a Pandemic, warned of a surge in this type of violence, though calls to helplines had dropped by more than 50%.“Experts in the field knew that rates of IPV had not decreased, but rather that victims were unable to safely connect with services,” the report warned.According to theAmerican Journal of Emergency Medicine and the United Nations entity UN Women, incidents of domestic violence have increased by as much as 300% in Hubei, China; 25% in Argentina, 30% in Cyprus, 33% in Singapore and 50% in Brazil during the pandemic.Meanwhile, Selvaratnam said it was important in her account to excavate why she had stayed in the relationship with Schneiderman as long as she did. “I had to explore how I got into the relationship in the first place,” she said. In part, she said, she discovered echoes of her parents’ relationship.“I wasn’t prepared for my path to intersect with an abuser, and I wasn’t prepared for the grooming, gaslighting and manipulation.” In her case, Selvaratnam said, her abuser was shielded by “powerful allies including his ex-wife, meditators, feminists. He fooled a lot of people, not just me. And a lot of people encouraged me to be in the relationship.” Schneiderman was at the time rumored to be steering toward a run for New York governor had Hillary Clinton, as anticipated, won the 2016 presidential election and the current governor, Cuomo, received a call to serve in the administration. Neither scenario transpired.Still, Selvaratnam said she was aware of the dangers she faced exposing a powerful politician, and was prepared to do so without the support of other women who, it would turn out, had been in the same predicament.In the book, Selvaratnam recounts that she and Schneiderman were introduced in July 2016 at the Democratic national convention in Philadelphia where they exchanged phone numbers. He began emailing her with articles about his battles with Exxon and Trump. “Good fantasy reading before bed …” he wrote. He sent a photo with himself and the spiritual teacher Ram Dass.At a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, the candidate complimented Schneiderman on the work he was doing. At a second, Harvey Weinstein approached with offers of raising money. Bill Clinton, too, was seated nearby.Five years on, Selvaratnam has developed a different impression of the “fairytale” she was seduced by. “The cults of personality that form around rich people, powerful people, talented people who are abusers are damaging to those who are in the cult and damaging to society. There’s a whole ecosystem and power-structure that needs to be dismantled so abusers are no longer shielded.”Selvaratnam said that while accumulation of power was not her motive, she was “swept up in the spotlight that was around Eric but that also made it difficult to come forward. There were many people who hoped he’d save us. He had a public-facing feminism and spirituality, but privately he abused me.“No powerful person who is an abuser is indispensable,” she states plainly, “and we now have Letitia James as state attorney general. I’m proud of that. It feels right. So I know I did the right thing, and that gives me strength.” More

Ronald Solomon spent five days making the 2,300-mile drive from Las Vegas, Nevada, to Orlando, Florida, where he will sell about 75 different hat designs, 15 types of flag, 10 T-shirt designs and a range of eight face masks.Solomon is the president of the Maga Mall, a retailer of Donald Trump and “Make America great again” merchandise. Undeterred by the former president’s 2020 election defeat and disgrace, he expects to do brisk business when the biggest annual gathering of grassroots conservatives opens on Thursday.“I speak to state and county Republican party leaders all over the United States and the base is solidly behind Trump,” the 61-year-old said by phone while driving through Louisiana. “As a matter of fact, there’s a movement afoot to get rid of what people call a Rino – a Republican in name only.”Solomon, whose range of masks includes “God, guns and Trump” and “Trump 2024”, will set up his booth at the four-day Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Orlando. The event has always been an effective way of taking the pulse of the Republican party and broader conservative movement.In 2016 Trump, who was assailing the Republican establishment in a nasty US presidential primary campaign, cancelled a planned appearance amid fears of boos and protests. But a year later, having vanquished Hillary Clinton, he was greeted as a conquering hero. CPAC became an annual Maga jamboree, less conservative policy shop than Trumpian cult of personality in action.The lineup at CPAC 2021 – switched to Florida from Maryland because of coronavirus safety constraints – suggest that Trump’s dominance is entirely undiminished by his loss of the White House and Republican setbacks in Congress.Speakers include his allies such as Mike Pompeo, the former secretary of state; Ben Carson, the ex-housing secretary; Sarah Sanders, a former White House press secretary; Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota; Pete Hegseth, a Fox News host; Jon Voight, an ardently pro-Trump actor; and Donald Trump Jr, the 45th president’s son.There are also slots for Senate Republicans including Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Cynthia Lummis and Rick Scott, and House Republicans such as Kevin McCarthy, Mo Brooks, Madison Cawthorn, Matt Gaetz and Jim Jordan, all of whom voted to challenge Joe Biden’s victory. The “big lie” of a stolen election is expected to thrive at CPAC.That is not least because the conference will culminate on Sunday with Trump himself. In his first post-presidential speech, he is expected to promise to back Maga candidates in next year’s midterm elections, condemn Biden’s reversal of his immigration policies and reserve particular venom for his foes within the Republican party.Matt Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union, which hosts CPAC, told the Reuters news agency: “Donald Trump is going to stay in the game and will be involved in primaries and he’s going to opine and he’s going to give speeches, and for establishment Republicans it puts shivers down their spine. They’re very concerned he’s going to continue to have an impact. My advice to them is to get used to it.”Among the talking points will be a straw poll of attendees on their preferences for the Republican nomination in 2024. Given the section of the party that now rules CPAC, there is little doubt that Trump will emerge the winner.Tim Miller, former political director of Republican Voters Against Trump, said: “He’s gonna speak right after the 2024 straw poll, which presumably will show him with a landslide victory, and so I think it’s set up for him speak in a way that will signal that he sees himself as the leader of the party, as the frontrunner for 2024. He will attack those who have questioned him in that regard.“I’m sure he’ll be received overwhelmingly positively by the crowd in those appeals. The Republicans are doing this to themselves. They had an opportunity to put a stake in his heart [at this month’s impeachment trial]; they didn’t take it and he’s in charge of the party right now. He has the support of a plurality, if not a majority of the voters within the party. There is no real organized wing for challenging him.”Just as revealing as who is at CPAC is who is not.The former vice-president Mike Pence, apparently abandoned by Trump on 6 January even as a violent mob closed in at the US Capitol, declined an invitation. Nikki Haley, an ex-ambassador to the UN who was sharply critical of the president’s role in the insurrection but then reportedly tried and failed to heal the rift, will also not be present.Another absentee will be Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, who voted to acquit Trump on a technicality at the impeachment trial but then eviscerated him for inciting the deadly riot. If McConnell’s intention was to the light the party’s path to a post-Trump future, however, few analysts believe he will succeed.Miller, writer-at-large at the Bulwark website and former communications director for Jeb Bush’s 2016 campaign, commented: “In the actual battlefield of the campaigns, there’s no McConnell wing, there are no candidates saying that Trump shouldn’t have advanced the big lie. There are going to be no candidates for Senate besides Lisa Murkowski [of Alaska] saying that we should move on from Donald Trump and that he’s complicit in the coup and there’s a shameful moment in our history. The Republican candidates are all for Trump.”Republicans who voted to impeach or convict Trump have been censured and vilified by their home state parties. Solomon, the Trump merchandise seller, attended a recent rally in Wyoming that called on the local congresswoman Liz Cheney to resign.He said: “McConnell just got re-elected. If McConnell was up in 22, there’s no way he would have said what he said because there’s no way he would win. Right now in Kentucky, a cat would win a primary against McConnell.”Right now in Kentucky, a cat would win a primary against McConnellA CNN poll last month found that three in four Republicans believe that Biden did not legitimately win the presidential election, even though state officials and courts found no significant evidence to back Trump’s claims of voter fraud. The conspiracy theorists are expected to be out in force at CPAC.Tamara Leigh, a past CPAC attendee who protested in Washington on 6 January but was a was a block or two away from the US Capitol when it was stormed, said she feels “100%” certain that the election was stolen. She cited conversations with Patrick Byrne, a former Overstock.com chief executive, and a film produced by Mike Lindell, the chief executive of MyPillow (both men’s claims have been widely debunked).Leigh, who is in her 50s and works in communications, added: “If Trump runs in 2024, I absolutely would support him and I think his base will follow. His base is the Republican party. The 78 million Trump voters [the true figure was 74 million] are still standing with our president and I believe the majority are resolved to continue to fight even harder. The support will be with him, not with the GOP.”Last year’s CPAC at the National Harbor in Maryland had the slogan “America vs socialism”, a message that fell flat against the moderate Democrat Biden. The event suffered a scare when it emerged that an attendee had been infected with the coronavirus.This year’s organizers are insisting that masks be worn, although many of the speakers were notably reluctant to do so for months. Brandon Morris, a nurse in Orlando who attended CPAC two years ago, said: “This is Florida. I don’t know if you saw the Super Bowl? When I was in New York, everyone wore masks but in Florida, it’s just a cultural difference. Some people will wear masks, some people probably won’t wear masks.”This year’s theme is “America Uncanceled”, a reference to the current conservative sport of accusing liberals of applying “cancel culture” to those whose views they do not share. But it is a slogan that the Maga crowd might themselves apply to McConnell, Cheney and other dissidents who will be nowhere near Orlando.Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center thinktank in Washington, said: “What there’s going to be over the next year or so is a question as to how people who would prefer President Trump not be the leading voice for the Republican party position themselves. There’ll be many different views on that and many different attempts.“Clearly McConnell is somebody who will defend all sitting senators and who’s made his views about Trump’s action on January 6 clear. But McConnell is not somebody who plays from out front. He likes to play from behind, so I will not expect it to be a McConnell versus Trump show. It may be to Trump’s advantage to try and make it that but it’s not in McConnell’s interest to accept the bait.” More

Sign up for the Guardian’s First Thing newsletterJoe Biden has formally reversed a series of executive actions taken by Donald Trump, including a proclamation that blocked many green card applicants from entering the United States.Trump issued the ban last year, saying it was needed to protect US workers amid high unemployment due to the coronavirus pandemic. Biden rejected that reasoning in a proclamation rescinding the visa ban on Wednesday. The president said it had prevented families from reuniting in the United States and harmed US businesses.Other actions undone by the president included one that sought to cut funding from several cities Trump had deemed “lawless” and “anarchist jurisdictions”, and another mandating that federal buildings should be designed in a classical aesthetic.The reversals come as the new president seeks to press forward with his own agenda and undo key aspects of his predecessor’s legacy. Since taking office last month, Biden has revoked dozens of Trump orders and issued dozens more of his own.Immigrant advocates had pressed in recent weeks for him to lift the visa ban, which was set to expire on 31 March. Biden left in place another ban on most foreign temporary workers.Curtis Morrison, a California-based immigration attorney who represents people subject to the ban, said Biden will now have to tackle a growing backlog of applications that have been held up for months as the pandemic shut down most visa processing by the state department. The process could potentially take years, he said.“It’s a backlog that Trump created,” Morrison said. “He broke the immigration system.”The latest slate of revocations targeted a grab-bag of issues, including a few that Trump signed in his last months in office.Trump issued a memorandum in September that sought to identify municipal governments that permit “anarchy, violence and destruction in American cities.” The memorandum followed protests over George Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis police. The justice department identified New York City, Portland, Oregon, and Seattle as three cities that could have federal funding slashed.Those cities in turn filed a lawsuit to invalidate the designation, and fight off the Trump administration’s efforts to withhold federal dollars.Pete Holmes, the city attorney of Seattle, welcomed the Biden revocation, saying he was “glad to have this nonsense cleared from the decks”.Another reversed order included one issued by Trump in his waning days, which mandated federal buildings return to a more classical style of architecture. The memorandum added that architects should look to “America’s beloved landmark buildings” such as the White House, the US Capitol, the supreme court, the Department of the Treasury and the Lincoln Memorial for inspiration.Biden also revoked a 2018 order that called for agency heads across the government to review welfare programs – such as food stamps, Medicaid and housing aid – and strengthening work requirements for certain recipients. More